Monday, 11 August 2014

Around the age of 20 I found myself struggling with some fairly deep philosophical questions. The most important was this: assuming (as I did) naturalism is true, then what should I do?

It seemed clear to me then (and still does) that if naturalism is true, the is-ought problem is insurmountable. There can be no objective moral truths or goals. The best we can do is identify commonly held moral values and pursue them. Unfortunately --- if honesty is one of those values --- we cannot tell others that their behavior is, in any objective sense, wrong. For example, we observe that Hitler's moral opinions are different from ours, but we could not claim that our moral opinions are intrinsically more valid. All we could do is wage war against him and hope our side prevails. Might makes right.

That doesn't make naturalism incoherent, but it opens a chasm between what naturalists can really believe about moral statements and the way almost everyone uses them in practice. The more die-hard naturalists are prone to say things like "naturalism is true, and therefore everyone should ... (stop believing in God, etc)" without respecting the limitation that the consequent ought-statements are subjective opinions, not objectively rational facts. It's really very difficult to be a proper moral relativist through-and-through!

Making this all much more difficult was my awareness of being able to reshape my own moral opinions. The evolutionary-psychology approach of "these are the values imbued by my primate brain; work them out" seems totally inadequate when the rational part of my brain can give priority to any subset of values (or none) and use that as justification for rewriting the others. Given a real choice between being a hero and a monster, on what grounds can one make that decision? It seemed a bit narrow-minded to reject monstrosity simply because it was less popular.

This all made me very dissatisfied with naturalism as a worldview. If it's true, but is powerless to say how one should live --- indeed, denies that there can be any definitive guidance how to live --- it's inadequate. Like a scientific theory that lacks predictive power, whether it's true or not, one has to keep looking for more.

Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've
ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft. Google controls Android, which is
winning; Chrome, which is winning; and key Web properties in Search, Youtube,
Gmail and Docs, which are all winning. The potential for lock-in is vast
and they're already exploiting it,
for example by restricting certain Google Docs features (e.g. offline
support) to Chrome users, and by writing contracts with Android OEMs forcing
them to make Chrome the default browser. Other bad things are happening that
I can't even talk about. Individual people and groups
want to do the right thing but the corporation routes around them. (E.g.
PNaCl and Chromecast avoided Blink's Web standards commitments by
declaring themselves not part of Blink.) If Google achieves a state
where the Internet is really only accessible through Chrome (or Android apps),
that situation will be very difficult to escape from, and it will give Google
more power than any company has ever had.

Microsoft and Apple will try to stop Google but even if they were to
succeed, their goal is only to replace one victor with another.

So if you want an Internet --- which means, in many ways, a world --- that isn't
controlled by Google, you must stop
using Chrome now and encourage others to do the same. If you don't, and
Google wins, then in years to come you'll wish you had a choice and have
only yourself to blame for spurning it now.

Of course, Firefox is the best alternative :-). We have a good browser,
and lots of dedicated and brilliant people improving it.
Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Mozilla is totally committed to the
standards-based Web platform as a long-term strategy against lock-in.
And one thing I can say for certain is that
of all the contenders, Mozilla is least likely to establish world
domination :-).